Chapter I – The Hours That Slip Between
The fluorescent lights trembled faintly above me, casting a pallid glow upon my scattered notes. A low, intermittent hum pressed against the silence—not loud enough to notice at first, but impossible to ignore once heard.
The pages beneath my fingers felt wrong—too dry, as though they had been handled too many times, or not at all. I turned one, and the paper rasped softly, the sound unnaturally sharp in the stillness.
Words refused to cohere; sentences unraveled the moment I grasped them. I read, and reread, and understood nothing.
A thought, soft yet insistent, pressed itself into my awareness:
You are falling apart.
And then—
"You're reading like you're trying to outrun something."
The voice did not break the silence. It settled into it.
And beneath it—faint, almost imperceptible—
the smell of something cold. Not unpleasant. Just… absent of warmth. Like air untouched by breath.
I looked up.
He was already sitting across from me.
Why was he there? And how had he appeared so quietly, so impossibly?